ABOUT
Working from her Dublin-based studio in Ireland, Laura Kelly makes work ranging in size from small wall-based pieces to large site-specific constructed drawings. These reference a number of subjects including the landscape genre; viewing display strategies; japanese spatial aesthetics; and minimalism. She is especially interested in an expanded approach to drawing through the use of various combinations of surfaces and materials. Space plays a prominent role in conjunction with the representational aspects of traditional drawing. Landscape (in particular, expansive, snow-covered, disorientating terrains) provides a starting point and line plays a dominant role. The materials she uses include paper, thread, wire, graphite, watercolour, acrylic, wood, foamboard and tape and her work often moves between 2d and 3d. She is also motivated by the idea of drawing-as-construction in search of a 'habitat'.
Her ongoing aesthetic response to landscape has come to centre around the manner in which dispersed, depicted fragments of line and mark-making can be united through the viewer’s perception to provide a ‘proposition’ of landscape. The use of the horizon as a contextual locator; perceptual processes (including focused and peripheral vision); & spatial ordering/perspective systems all underlie it. She is concerned with how the interplay between surface, materiality, mark-making and suggested illusion can combine to create a sensation of transience and perceptual ambiguity. She deliberately strives for an air of temporary occupation and fragile attachment and a concern with the perilous state of the natural environment pervades her work.
She has also extended her investigations through the medium of experimental animation. Produced with a hand-drawn aesthetic, the short 'vignette' pieces she makes are deliberately unyielding as to their precise nature, defying immediate comprehension. In a digital age filled with images, audiences often view with a distracted eye her intention is to create a viewing process that challenges the quick glance through the exploration of perceptual thresholds (eg in motion/standing still; depth/flatness; representation/abstraction) where one mode of experience begins and another ends. Attention is also drawn to both the individual content of frames as well as to the overall sequences.
Her ongoing aesthetic response to landscape has come to centre around the manner in which dispersed, depicted fragments of line and mark-making can be united through the viewer’s perception to provide a ‘proposition’ of landscape. The use of the horizon as a contextual locator; perceptual processes (including focused and peripheral vision); & spatial ordering/perspective systems all underlie it. She is concerned with how the interplay between surface, materiality, mark-making and suggested illusion can combine to create a sensation of transience and perceptual ambiguity. She deliberately strives for an air of temporary occupation and fragile attachment and a concern with the perilous state of the natural environment pervades her work.
She has also extended her investigations through the medium of experimental animation. Produced with a hand-drawn aesthetic, the short 'vignette' pieces she makes are deliberately unyielding as to their precise nature, defying immediate comprehension. In a digital age filled with images, audiences often view with a distracted eye her intention is to create a viewing process that challenges the quick glance through the exploration of perceptual thresholds (eg in motion/standing still; depth/flatness; representation/abstraction) where one mode of experience begins and another ends. Attention is also drawn to both the individual content of frames as well as to the overall sequences.